The particular course of his reading while at Oxford, and during the
time of vacation which he passed at home, cannot be traced. Enough
has been said of his irregular mode of study. He told me that from his
earliest years he loved to read poetry, but hardly ever read any poem to
an end; that he read Shakspeare at a period so early, that the speech of
the ghost in Hamlet terrified him when he was alone; that Horace's Odes
were the compositions in which he took most delight, and it was long
before he liked his Epistles and Satires. He told me what he read
SOLIDLY at Oxford was Greek; not the Grecian historians, but Homer and
Euripides, and now and then a little Epigram; that the study of which
he was the most fond was Metaphysicks, but he had not read much, even in
that way. I always thought that he did himself injustice in his account
of what he had read, and that he must have been speaking with reference
to the vast portion of study which is possible, and to which a few
scholars in the whole history of literature have attained; for when
I once asked him whether a person, whose name I have now forgotten,
studied hard, he answered 'No, Sir; I do not believe he studied hard.
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